What if the first moon landing had ended in disaster?

This alternate history of the first moon landing aims for the impossible – and it’s done with style.

This alternate history of the first moon landing aims for the impossible – and it’s done with style.

Here’s a tip for how not to approach a novel: do not read the first 30 pages, conclude that it might be a bit over-punctuated, then flick to the back of the book to check if the author has named the editor.

You might end up unwittingly scanning an “author’s note” and thereby discover too quickly something that the writer had planned to reveal a little later in the piece.

David Dyer's This Kingdom of Dust

Despite my best efforts to sabotage my own reading experience, I greatly enjoyed and admired David Dyer’s second novel, This Kingdom of Dust. It’s an ambitious, accomplished and original attempt at answering a question central to the imagination of a generation (my generation, as it happens): what would’ve happened if the first Moon landing had ended in disaster, and the ballad of Apollo 11 had been David Bowie’s Space Oddity?

Dyer reimagines the triumphantly successful 1969 mission as being marred by an engine failure in the lunar module, leaving astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stranded in the Sea of Tranquility and their crewmate Michael Collins sitting in his tin can, far above the Moon.

But This Kingdom of Dust is far more than just a counterfactual conceit. It offers engaging meditations on religion, writing, meaning and death, all animated and illuminated by Dyer’s pacy, exciting and often unexpectedly moving storytelling.

Like any good writer, Dyer grounds his metaphors in the concerns of his characters. So, to Buzz Aldrin, astronaut and physicist, when something is worth either everything or nothing, it is “like a teaspoon of matter from a black hole” in that “you could register either its blankness, or the fact that it weighs as much as the Sun”.

Or, magnificently, when Aldrin remains perfectly still, he is “like a capacitor awaiting the build-up of electrons between its plates before discharging”.

I’ve no idea what that means, but writing of this kind leaves me glowing with admiration, like, er, the flame from the thrusters of an ascending lunar module when the reaction control system’s propellants reach the combustion chamber in the main engine and stimulate the hypergolic mixing of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide.

Or something.

But back to Dyer:

“Buzz was exhausted, but in the same way that a negative number multiplied by a negative becomes positive again, he felt his fatigue intensifying into an exhilarating alertness.”

I can’t imagine that anyone else could have composed that sentence.

Dyer writes to forceful, driving rhythms. He makes words march. He describes technical procedures with forceful clarity. He prioritises precision.

That said, his style generally doesn’t make for great dialogue. “It’s a long shot,” says Armstrong, at one point, “but it just might work.”

Dyer seems impatient with the frivolities and flourishes of colloquial speech. It’s possible that astronauts might address each other with the functional blandness of Dyer’s characters, but the author also has “Aquarius”, the god-king of gonzo journalism, consistently express himself with improbable banality – thus, the most fecund and creative vulgarian in the US barely utters a profanity.

But Dyer can be funny and poetic too, sometimes simultaneously. When Aquarius interviews Aldrin’s wife, he realises that he is “only a few feet from Joan, but together they were a quarter of a million miles from her husband” and “surely the three of them thus formed the most elongated isosceles triangle in all of history”.

And this, I think, is a lovely passage:

“Neil’s face was now close enough for Buzz to feel the cool breeze of his breath, and he had the odd idea that he might be the only human being who exhaled more oxygen than he inhaled. How could he distrust such a man?”

At first, I had assumed Dyer’s novel was a playful thriller with partially realised literary pretensions. Then I mistook it for philosophical speculative fiction. It is only right at the end of the book that Dyer reveals the true extent of his ambitions.

And he, like Apollo 11, is aiming for the impossible – and he knows that, too.

Which isn’t to say that he hasn’t achieved something marvellous. The second half of the novel, in particular, is wonderful.

Dyer writes especially well when he describes the nuances and fluidities of mistrust, doubt and envy. He offers a convincing template for the relationship between the three astronauts: the first man on the Moon; the second man on the Moon; and the third man, who left the Earth to never set foot on the Moon.

I don’t know how closely Dyer sticks to the truth of the astronauts’ biographies, but my already profound admiration for Buzz Aldrin, who punched a Moon-landing denier on the jaw at the age of 72, has only deepened after reading this book.

And I don’t mean to be petty, but I have to say this: either Dyer or his editor uses too many commas.

Mark Dapin is an author and journalist who was five years old when astronauts first walked on the Moon